


this suit of rags and patches (shows all the colors of my heart)

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [12]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Arkham Asylum, Dramatic Irony, Earth-3, F/M, Harlequin, Humor, Literary References & Allusions, On Earth-3 everything is backwards, Owlman is a fan of poetic justice, Pining, Schmoop, Tom O'Bedlam, and seeing his enemies broken at his feet, mad love, medical confidentiality is serious business
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-05
Updated: 2015-02-28
Packaged: 2018-03-09 13:27:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3251417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She nodded, lips pursed thoughtfully. "How do you feel about 'Mister J?'"</p><p>That was the way anonymous patients were referred to in psych literature, he knew, just a title and a letter, but that was also the kind of 'how do you feel' he could really get behind.</p><p>His grin felt more real than it had in a long while. "Mister J will do," he pronounced. "Doctor Q."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Quinzel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Slight warning for mention of suicidal ideation? And (relatedly) an inadvisable relationship with a prescribed drug regimen - the prescription itself is bad, taking antipsychotics irregularly is very bad, all of that is bad.

Arkham was better than death.

Jokester knew this. He also knew that Owlman hated him, and was _more_ than willing to kill people, and definitely had no sentimental reasons for keeping him alive, which meant that if he was here instead of an unmarked grave, his enemy believed it to be a fate worse than death.

Jokester tried not to let Owlman's opinions count for much. Anything else led to the _bad_ kind of madness.

Arkham was _better_ than death, if only because from Arkham you could escape. Where there was life, there was hope. He was a great believer in hope, so he quite frequently reminded himself that his present situation could be much worse. Could _get_ much worse, even without the dying. He knew it was true. Just as he knew his therapist was not really his friend.

She was the fifth doctor they'd assigned him, and he knew she was going to be better than the last one when she said, "Do you prefer to be called Mister Jokester?"

He snorted out a snigger. "No. That sounds stupid. I just told the last guy that because any extra seconds he spent saying my name were seconds he wasn't saying anything else."

Doctor Laupon had a lot of theories about the criminal mind, especially the criminal psychotic, and he was determined to get his criminal psychotics to fall in line with them. Saying anything he didn't already expect to hear was asking for trouble, so most sessions with him were spent listening to him explain you. Apparently, J was a compulsive liar, because of some really dreadful things that should not be part of anyone's early life, that he unfortunately couldn't _one hundred percent swear_ had never happened to him. (Becker, the least offensive of the bunch so far, had tried hypnotherapy on that, but that required the patient's cooperation, which required trust, which no. Wouldn't have worked anyway.)

J had liked Doc Thompkins' hypotheses about his childhood much better. But _she_ wasn't a psychiatrist, or _even_ a psychologist, so her opinion was not, he had been informed, relevant.

He looked sidelong now at the little blonde woman in the big comfy chair beside her desk; he'd sprawled all over her couch at the first opportunity, and it gave him a lot more options on what angle to look at her from. Upside-down often upset people. She hadn't told him to sit up yet. "I kinda like the 'Mister,' though," he told her, offhand. Not overfamiliar, made him sound like a real person; right now, it was all win.

She nodded, lips pursed thoughtfully. Her lipstick was perfect, like her hair and her neatly pressed blouse and skirt, and he wondered if that was because a pretty woman needed to project absolute control to be taken seriously, or for some internal reason. But they weren't here to talk about her. "How do you feel about 'Mister J?'"

That was the way anonymous patients were classically referred to in psych books, he knew, just a title and a letter, but that was also the kind of 'how do you feel' he could really get behind.

His grin felt more real than it had in a long while. "Mister J will do," he pronounced. "Doctor Q."

And she _was_ better than the other four. He didn't feel the need to provoke her every second, and she didn't seem compelled to have him sedated every time he laughed. Really, he _knew_ they had funny ideas about how dangerous he was, but did they really expect him to talk about his feelings _without_ laughing?

(The last two had kept trying to find out how he kept dyeing his hair in here: "It's really naturally purple?" Doctor Q marveled politely when he informed her no dye was involved.

"Well, I don't know if _natural's_ the word," he'd replied, shaking out the shoulder-length mane of it. It was surprising Owlman hadn't had his head shaved, while he was inflicting indignities, but maybe he thought J hated his hair, considering how it had come to be not-brown. "But it does just grow this way, yeah."

Given a choice between believing in purple hair and believing that he was managing to consistently bleach and dye his roots as they grew out, even in solitary confinement, even under constant guard, Quinzel believed him. It was nice to see some _actual_ sanity in this place.)

She wasn't his friend. Everything she did for him was to soften him up and get inside his head. He knew that. Visions of papers danced in her eyes with every small revelation—maybe, if she could get enough out of him, a _book_. The Jokester was notorious, after all, and hugely controversial. He could _make her career._

Sometimes he would swear she was plotting out chapters even as he talked. Even if she never made a major 'breakthrough' in his case, never changed him significantly (which she wouldn't), she could probably get pretty good sales just repackaging his philosophy as a tell-all, and hey, why would he say no to that? Most of his best-known escapades were basically just co-opting some form of stage to perform on. So long as he didn't get carried away and embarrass himself somehow, Quinzel's book would be a stage all its own. (Maybe his last one—no, he _was_ getting out of here, and hey, that would definitely help her sales, if he was out on the streets again when it was published. Heh.)

J's lack of childhood memories seemed to offend her less than it had the others, and she didn't mind when he got evasive, and even when he could tell she knew he was lying, she never did anything that could be interpreted as punishment.

So he hooked his knees over the back of the sofa, and borrowed the books off her shelves without asking, and asked intrusive questions about her personal life, some of which she even answered. From a combination of what she said and what she didn't he established that she had a rather strained relationship with her parents.

(She also had a little brother and two potted plants. And a surprisingly varied collection of tapes, including everything Tina Turner had put out since 1974. His current goal in life was to persuade her to sing _We Don't Need Another Hero_ at top volume, even if he had to go visit her at home after he broke out, convince her not to turn him in, and show off his mediocre cocktail-mixing skills until they were both drunk, or something.)

Quinzel was patient, and responsive, and to all appearances actually interested in what he had to say. She wasn't his first ambitious doctor, but she was the smartest.

Doctor Quinzel was in fact entirely too clever, and he gave away more than he meant to sometimes, because she _listened._ Jokester wasn't made to be alone, couldn't _stand_ it, needed to be around people, at least an _audience_ to play to if not his friends, but he spent more than half his Arkham time in solitary, due to an official advisory that he might be 'a danger to the other patients.' (Which, considering one of the guys on his ward had killed seventeen people and eaten their livers, was complete bullhockey and clearly Wayne's doing. Stupid Wayne and his stupid wealth.)

So when he was in Quinzel's office and she was actually _talking to him, like he actually existed_ , all bright eyes and engaged smiles, he kind of had a lot to say. If he hadn't, he'd probably have been conversing with his feet pretty soon. He told her so. She didn't up his antipsychotics. Trust increased.

"You wouldn't be put in separation so often if you would take your medication," said Doctor Q one day.

At one point he might have considered this disgustingly disingenuous, but just because she'd been made his primary therapist didn't mean she had complete control of his case, and the chief psychiatrist and asylum director could overrule her when it came to discipline. He knew, because he'd overheard her arguing about it, saying they were undermining her course of treatment by undermining her authority. So it wasn't exactly _her_ that was having him shut up alone for disobedience, even if she _was_ part of the machine.

And because she listened, he sat up and looked at her, and said (still smiling because he didn't trust her nearly enough to stop): "Those pills make me want to die."

He was very good, possibly the best in the asylum, at not taking his medication, but the days when he couldn't pull it off, or they figured out that he had, were the hardest to get through. This was his fourth month in Arkham. He had come up with forty-seven escape plans and thirty-one methods of suicide. Most of the former had been thwarted, or deemed not worth either the inherent risks or the inevitable collateral damage, yet.

He hadn't attempted to enact any of the latter. Yet.

Doctor Quinzel tapped her pen against her nice leather-bound notebook, lips pursed. She didn't think he was joking, and she knew he wasn't lying. "Depression can be a side effect. I'll see what I can do."

His prescription changed, and life in the loony pen grew a little less awful, though he still took the pills only as often as he couldn't get out of it. (Sleight of hand was the world's most useful skill. It was too bad none of the staff carried keys to the ward inside it, or he'd be long gone.)

Of course, to get away with not taking his meds he had to spend most of his time faking being _on_ his meds, which was both difficult and frustrating. As he'd told all his doctors at some point, the drugs they gave him to strangle down whatever type of crazy they'd decided he was this week weren't really all that picky about which parts of him to strangle. Brains were complicated. Whole sections of personality seemed to get carved away.

His sense of humor had once deserted him entirely for three hours straight, and it had been the first time in his life he could remember ever feeling really frightened. He didn't tell his doctor the last part.

There were a lot of things he didn't tell Doctor Quinzel, and never would. J was a pretty open guy, but even if the Owl _wasn't_ keeping an eye on him now, he'd _definitely_ go through all his records after he broke out. So he was vague a lot. He showed no weaknesses, betrayed no details about the people he cared for most. Having someone to talk to was nice, but you were obviously going to hit a wall in therapy if you couldn't tell your doctor anything you wouldn't want your worst enemy to hear.

Not that he minded. He was happy to keep his head screwed on as crooked as ever—he _liked_ his crazy. He _was_ his crazy. He had no intention of being cured, and was not here to become sane. He was just biding his time, til he got out.

At first, when Doctor Quinzel laughed at his jokes, it was a dainty thing, like silver bells, but as she got to know him better, and he learned just what she found funniest, her laughter went on longer and longer, until the silver bells were joined by big brass ones that clanged with joyful abandon, and then she was beautiful.

By the time he admitted she wasn't his enemy, he was more than half in love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So...in the pre-Flashpoint Earth-3 that gave us the Jokester, Harley got included for two panels just so she could be murdered as a dramatic prelude to the face-cutting scene. 
> 
> They had one issue of 'Countdown' to work with and were setting their lead up for a really weird tragic romance with Evelyn 'Three Face' Dent, so ok whatever, but jerking Harley into a life where she became Jackie's manager *just* for the sake of a cold-blooded fridging was one of many reasons I went off and started making a giant Earth-3 headcanon instead of playing in their sandbox. Tah-dah.
> 
> ^^ And, I should add, Harley has tapes in general (and the theme song to the third Mad Max movie specifically, I guess) because it's 1991, and while CDs are certainly a thing they have not yet ousted the audio cassette, especially from collections that people have been building since they were teenagers. I have a very precise timeline for this universe, guys. (I'm lying, my timeline is a goddamn mess. Highly detailed, though.)


	2. Harlene

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and _men_ , serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it." –Thoreau, Civil Disobedience

The fateful day started fairly ordinary, for a day in Arkham; maybe a little on the stressful end. Halfway through his three-o'clock session they had gone nowhere except in tiny circles, and back over some sociopolitical material they'd talked to death already. Doc Q sat beside her desk in the green wing-backed chair and sighed at his obstinacy. "I thought we were really starting to get somewhere, Mister J," she said sadly.

He tutted through his teeth.

"We don't have to talk about your scars today if you don't want to."

"Well, of course we don't!" he exclaimed, his cheer just short of manic. She couldn't _make_ him talk. It was the only thing he really had left, that decision of what to say or not say, besides the daily struggle to get out of taking his medications. It was…annoying that he couldn't resent that as strongly as he used to, because he was getting attached, but that didn't mean he had to let her blatantly manipulate him.

Doctor Quinzel set her notebook aside and folded her hands in her lap. "You don't have to tell me anything difficult, even if we do. But, Mister J, do you think you could just tell me, simply…how you got them?"

He stared at her. "How I got these scars?" A long white forefinger ran along the puckered flesh of his right cheek.

"We have seven different explanations in your file."

J nearly choked on the injustice of it. Flung his hands up to heaven, and erupted onto his feet so they could go up further, and then flung them out to the sides in aggrieved innocence. "Because no one ever believes me when I tell the truth!"

"Owlman?" she asked. He strained to hear condescension, but couldn't find any. He'd been told often enough that his obsession was ridiculous, that he didn't need to make things up to seem more interesting, even that Owlman didn't exist and blaming things on him was just a shielding behavior, even though J had _made sure_ the man was seen in his stupid bird suit several times before he was thrown in here, by witnesses the doctors ought to believe.

"Yes," he said, hesitant. Watching her. "He cut my face and dumped me in a vat of acid, because I kept standing up to him. I didn't die, but now I don't fit in anywhere except in people's nightmares."

Bleak, but he was in a bleak mood.

"I believe you," she told him gently. "And you _don't_ look like a nightmare, J."

Doctor Q smiled and cocked her head, and he felt something inside his ribs give a swoop and a flutter, and he dropped back into his seat simply because he could no longer trust his knees.

"You know," she confided, "if it would help you feel more comfortable, it's perfectly okay for you to call me Harlene."

"Harlene," he repeated. His heart did a funny little skip, and did it again when he looked into her warm eyes.

Oh.

_Oh._

He was in _so_ much trouble.

* * *

Next session was on a Monday, and she started him off with the usual routine; how are you feeling, any particular concerns, yes I had a lovely weekend. J didn't volunteer much but he didn't take the bit in his teeth, either, and Doctor…Harlene seemed to see this as promising.

"Why are you here?" she asked. Every week like clockwork, she asked it. The others had, too, less often but enough that he was pretty sure it was part of the basic Arkham playbook. At first he'd tried to be funny about it—"Great vacation spot," he'd said, and "I just can't get enough of that green Jell-O in the cafeteria," and then he'd been angry for a while; "Somebody paid somebody off," or "because you want to pretend you have a real job," or, once, " _Straitjacket._ "

With Harlene he'd moved back toward funny, though a bit more honest than before, but today he said, "Because either the Owl or Wayne actually _reads_."

She could tell the difference between this apparently nonsensical answer and the kind that really didn't mean much of anything, and frowned. "How is that connected?" she asked.

Doctor Q hated it when he talked about Bruce Wayne and his ties to Owlman. Wayne was, after all, the man primarily responsible for her pay checks, and now that Jokester had forced the Owl far enough into the light that several authorities had had to admit his existence, he was known to be deep into organized crime. It wasn't that it was surprising for powerful men to be involved in shady dealings, and Wayne was well known to be ice-cold, but still. Allegations like that could get her into trouble if she seemed to believe them too much, even _knowing_ he probably wasn't wrong.

Luckily he didn't have to push the Wayne connection too much to make this point. "Remember back in April, when I spent a couple of weeks pouring all those jellybeans over people and doing consciousness-raising demonstrations with a bullhorn?"

It was 'remember' rather than 'did you hear about,' because the jellybean thing especially had been very satisfactorily covered by the media. It was too funny a story to ignore, and several thousand rainbow candies all over someone's office or factory floor or commuter route, or gushing out the back of a truck, was not important or disruptive enough for any of the Powers of Gotham to be able to justify suppressing it. Harlene would have heard about it, if not at the time, then when she took over his case. She nodded, encouraging.

He smiled. "Literary reference. 'Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman.' Harlan Ellison. I _love_ that story. If I'd read it before 'Jokester' caught on I might be 'Harlequin' right now, even if it doesn't start with a J.

"I teased Owlman about it when he came after me then—the Ticktockman is a _government official_ in a mask, not a crimelord, but he's all about order, and so is the Owl, in his way. This is _his_ city, he says. I disrupt it. But the Harlequin in the story—he's a lot like me."

J flashed his best grin at her—not the charming thing it'd been before his face had been cut and colorless, but people still registered it as a smile, not a threat. He only sometimes made babies cry. "Hero of the masses," he continued, in a tone of false modesty. "And," he added more quietly, "he's _all_ about freedom."

Harlene leaned forward a little to show her continued interest, but didn't interrupt. She'd made a few notes, but she was good about not being ostentatious about it.

"His world is a lot worse than this one," Jokester added quietly, eyes focusing for a moment far away, on a distant fiction of a tan-faced man with auburn hair, in a suit of colors and bells, laughing in a future world with so, so little joy and no freedom at all, where a man in a mask with no heart of his own could-and-would turn your heart off, when you had been tardy too many times, or simply lived long enough to wear out your use. Laughing, and giving everything he had to try to break everyone's chains, even though the chains were all inside their heads.

"And I won't let anything like it happen," he added, clasping his hands together, and glancing at his doctor again, she who was supposed to tease and twist and push and soothe him into something that could live in the system, not disrupting it, not demanding it change for the better.

 _Pretty Alice,_ he thought, thinking of the story world again and the woman who'd given Harlequin away, when he'd thought she still loved him, but Doctor Q had never lied, and they weren't any sort of couple, and if she betrayed him—well, he would have no real right to be surprised.

His mouth twisted, and he looked at his hands again instead, his bone-white hands. "The thing is, you see," he said to those hands, "they caught him, in the story. Harlequin. He had a real name and a real heart, and they could have killed him easily, but they sent him away to Coventry and worked him over till he gave in, and he wasn't anymore, wasn't Harlequin, wasn't anyone, and he went on TV and told them all he'd been wrong."

He chafed his hands together. They were cold, even though the office wasn't. "That's why I'm here," he said, almost under his breath. "One of them _reads_."

Harlene's hand closed over his, delicate and very warm. "Mister J," she told him, very seriously, leaning close with her big blue eyes so warm and sincere, "I _promise_ that is not what I'm trying to do to you."

He closed his. "I know," he said. Her hand was so _warm_. He wanted to clasp it between both of his, but that would give away too much. (How long would it be before Owlman noticed she was ruining his punishment?)

"I want to help you."

"I know."

She squeezed at his fingers, bracing and confidential. "Thank you for trusting me."

J laughed aloud at the irony. He spent the rest of the session laughing, and Harlene couldn't get him to explain why, but she didn't stop holding his hand.

* * *

"Hey, Clownface."

The voice of one of his fellow inmates broke into J's musings. This was the first time since his arrival he'd been allowed into the rec room and _not_ spent the entire time socializing with anyone willing to give him the time of day, which showed just how wrapped up in his thoughts he was, and the hand that had been repeatedly tracing the distended line of his own mouth came to a halt as the other man loomed over the back of his couch. "Cut it out. You're creeping everyone out." Since 'everyone' on this occasion included the man who'd eaten seventeen human livers, J suspected he should be proud, though the possibility that the looming patient was exaggerating certainly existed.

His name was Niles Hathwich, and he claimed he could breathe underwater because he was half Atlantean. This would not have presented a problem had it actually been true, but he was in every physical respect a perfectly normal surface human.

Niles had a long history of stealing other people's boats in his quest to 'get home,' and once he was out of sight of the shore either scuttling the craft or leaping over the side. His remarkable record of miraculous survival, shameless grand larceny, and blatant break with reality had eventually landed him here, where he was known as 'Fins' and had a knack for getting contraband in through some kind of favor-trading network that encompassed a number of staff.

Although he had been hostile to attempts to leverage his network to escape, J rather liked him.

"Seriously, Clownface, cut it out. Your mouth hasn't gotten any less fucked up since you got here."

J popped up to sit on the couch instead of sprawl, fingers still pressed against his lips, gave Fins an open, bewildered look, with comically wide eyes, and blew a long, questioning raspberry.

The big man snorted. "'course, your mouth could always get _worse_ , I rearrange it for you," he grumbled. Fins had spent quite a few years in and out of prison before being remanded to Arkham Asylum, and carried a lot of coping behaviors over. He didn't actually start many fights, although rumor about the time in group therapy that a serial arsonist turned out to actually _be_ the pyrokinetic meta he'd said he was, and Fins took him on hand to hand before he could set the place on fire and kill them all, meant that his threats were taken fairly seriously.

Jokester was just contemplating the costs and benefits of picking a fight with him himself when Fins sloped off, and J dropped back onto the sofa, giggling a little at his own latest form of crazy.

He'd never been one for controlling his thoughts—usually would balk at the very idea—but now he wished he had at least a little mastery of the technique. Because his traitorous mind wouldn't leave well enough alone, and being punched in the face actually sounded like a great distraction. His bruises always turned so many pretty colors.

He'd read psychology books. Before and since starting to raid Harlene's shelves. He knew people thought they were in love with their therapists _all the time_ , just because when you had a person who put that much effort into you and seemed to care about you that much, and you gave them all those pieces of yourself, it was easy to want them to be all yours and never leave you. No competent psychiatrist would take it seriously, and no one like Harlene Quinzel would take _him_ seriously even if he wasn't her patient. Crazy, nameless, penniless, hideous— _stop that,_ he told himself. Normally he liked himself just fine, but normally he wasn't evaluating his romantic prospects.

It wasn't _fair_ that his only good doctor and the nicest person in Arkham was also so… _sweet,_ and _pretty_ , and… _augh._

He rolled over and buried his face in the couch cushions. The worst anyone here could do if he left his guard down was try to eat him.

Decisions had to be made.

* * *

Two days later, Harlene sat patiently while he ransacked her office. He found one fairly cheap audio bug on the bottom of a potted plant and a more sophisticated one between the pages of _Jungian Archetypes and Identity_ , and destroyed them both. He kept looking for a while, but finally decided that had been everything. Then he sat down on her desk, leaned forward over steepled fingers, and said to his psychologist, not smiling, "Can you promise me something?"

Patience had turned into a sort of affronted shock. "Were those _recording devices?_ "

"Yes."

"In _my office?_ "

"I think the one under the aster was the asylum director. He's paranoid about being ousted if his control of the staff slips. The one in the book was probably from Owlman. I guess he's interested in my progress after all." He favored her with a grin. " _They watch you at your hearth / they watch you in your bed / the Court of Owls is not / just a thing inside my head._ I'm crazy, Doctor Q. Not delusional."

"I told you," she said, oddly steady, "you can call me Harlene."

"Okay. Harlene." He leaned forward. "Can you promise me? That if I'm frank, you won't make any notes that Owlman could get his hands on?"

"I..." She wanted to tell him that would never happen, that it was just his paranoia talking, he could see that, but her eyes flickered to the fragmented little machines in the middle of her desk, and narrowed in anger.

Harlene Quinzel took her job seriously. He'd realized that. Yes, she was chasing glory, but she still held that there was a sacred trust in psychiatry, that it was a branch of medicine and the Hippocratic Oath held, and her calling didn't even _exist_ if she couldn't promise true confidentiality to her patients.

How many had she coaxed into telling her their deepest secrets here, not knowing they would run into outside ears? She was probably angrier about old Amadeus Arkham than Owlman. She'd been fighting him gently for years, on small things, but never really dug in her heels, because she never had any _proof_ there was anything actually _wrong,_ wrong enough that whistle-blowing would do anything other than ruin her.

She still didn't.

Her lips pressed together, and something flashed in her eyes. "This is no good," she said quietly, and looked him in the eyes. "We're not helping you at all, are we?"

He shrugged. Not one bit, but he didn't want to say it.

"We're just being… _used._ "

She looked so wretched he wanted to take her hand, but it wasn't his place. She wasn't his friend, after all. Even if she really was on his side, even if he cared about her, even if being a good doctor was the most important thing to her after all…she wasn't his friend.

"So will you promise? Not to write anything down?" he asked.

"I'll do you one better," said Harlene. Something stubborn in the set of her jaw he'd never seen before. "If I'm rebelling anyway I might as well do it right. Stop hiding from me, Mister J, and I'll get you out of here."

He wanted out. He wanted out _so much,_ and his heart leapt, but something in him twisted up into a little ball and cried because that meant he wouldn't see her anymore. Especially now that it turned out that on top of being beautiful, which he'd known all along, and caring and clever with a great sense of humor, she was _brave,_ too. He wanted to see that valiant snap in her eyes again and again and again.

But that was the smaller voice, the stupid one, because giving up everything and abandoning people who needed you to spend time around someone who'd never see you that way was too crazy even for him, and he had no trouble grinning his biggest, brightest grin. "That would be the _best_ Christmas present, Doctor Q."

"Harlene. Well. My friends call me Harley," she told him. And smiled fit to break his heart.

He was crazy, and he had a face like a fright mask, and he didn't have a home or a past or a future, unless they could steal that last one back. There was not one reason in the world he should let her suspect.

Harlene wouldn't laugh at him if she ever found out, because she was too professional and too kind, but that was really too bad, because he liked to hear her laugh. Besides being funny, he didn't have that much to offer. Funny, and interestingly insane.

So he lay back, and gave himself over to her in the only form she would ever want.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The short story in question is widely considered a classic; I feel kind of like I'm cheating by using it, the analogy is so easy. The Thoreau quote at the top of the page is an excerpt of the excerpt at the front of 'Repent, Harlequin!' 
> 
> 'Fins' is my own creation, sadly, not a canon cameo. And Amadeus Arkham ought by rights to have died insane decades ago, to be succeeded by his nephew, but I have exercised executive privilege and altered the backstory of the asylum and its owners for 1) coherency, 2) timeline reasons, and 3) not freaking me out.


	3. Harley

_"From the **hag** and hungry goblin_

_that into **rags** would **rend** ye_

_the spirit that **stands** by the naked **man  
**_

_in the Book of Moons_

_de **fend** ye._

_That **of** your five sound senses   
_

_ye never **be** forsaken..."_

Jokester was singing.

He'd done a lot of singing, since he'd been put in here--it was a good way to keep track of the passing of time, since he'd never been allowed a clock, and it was entertaining, and it didn't make you notice how no one was listening the way talking did; talking to yourself more than a little was _more than a little_ desperate, but singing to yourself was just singing.

His voice wasn't what it used to be--never _would_ be, would always crack on the high notes and fail to hit the low ones and just generally fail to reverberate right, and when he tried to really _hold_ any note he still sometimes fell to coughing instead, because the acid had scarred him down inside, too--but he still had his sense of pitch and rhythm, and honestly he felt more comfortable being heard to sing again now, after all this practice. But the only audience he had were the orderlies, who knew perfectly well they were actually prison guards and acted like it, and he chose his material with that in mind.

Some of his previous doctors had given them blanket permission to sedate or otherwise repress him if he made them uncomfortable. Harlene had retracted it, even before they came to an understanding.

It was inexpressibly satisfying to grin out through the little barred grate in his door at wide-shouldered Brad pacing by with his nightstick and his taser and his unnerved expression, and be relatively sure he wasn't going to wind up hurting for it. Even better would be never seeing Brad or his esteemed colleagues again, but that was an ongoing project.

There'd been more than one time he'd come very close to going ahead with one of the escape plans that would certainly injure and very likely kill some of the orderlies. He wondered if they suspected that. You'd think, if they did, that they'd be kinder. So it was probably a general, spine-tingling deep sort of nervousness they felt around him, not a real, solid terror of what he might do if he ever got the chance.

 " _Of thirty bare **years** have **I  
**_

_twice twenty been en **rage** 'd, _

_And of forty **been** thrice-times **fif** **teen**_

_In **dur** ance soundly  **cage'd.** "    
_

There was a lot that could be done with Tom O'Bedlam's Song if what you wanted to be was creepy, even without good breath support, and Jokester was doing most of it--high creaky warbles and gentle rasping whispers, gentle melancholy switching out for true, deep menace in less than a heartbeat, and back again even faster.

_"In the **lordly lofts** of Bedlam_

_with the stubble soft and dainty_

_brave **bracelets** strong_

_sweet whips **ding-dong**_

_and wholesome hunger **plenty**."    
_

No one actually starved in Arkham. That would be hard to cover up, especially since there were decent folks like Harlene on the staff. But sufficiently intransigent patients could be sent to their cells without supper, like naughty children. And sometimes, you got sent to your room without dinner, or lunch, or breakfast, for a lot of days before you gave in.

Sometimes they put you on an IV to keep you alive, but they still wouldn't _feed_ you. On the paperwork, it always said that the patient had gone on hunger strike, and for their own good had to be cuffed to a bed and fed intravenously--or sometimes, after a while of that, they'd put in a feeding tube, and shove simple foodlike paste into you, to get your stomach working again after too long not using it. But they still wouldn't let you _eat._

Jokester'd seen it. Never up close, but it was harder to hide from fellow patients than not-directly-involved staff, when the official story about what someone had chosen or not chosen was bogus, and they didn't try so hard, either--after all, no one was going to believe incarcerated lunatics. And maybe he wasn't as stupidly brave as everyone thought, because he'd always skated just short of provoking that kind of thing--he'd been biding his time, sure, trying to lull them into a false sense of security before he made his move, but the fact remained, he hadn't ever been consistently defiant in quite the way that got you put on hunger strike. Saucy, sure. Subversive, kind of a lot. But not out-and-out troublesome. He hadn't wanted to give them an excuse.

Maybe that just showed he wasn't really crazy.

_"Though **I** do sing_

_any **food** ,_

_any **feeding?  
**_

_Money, drink, or clothing?_

_Come **dame** , come **maid** , be not afraid--_

_Poor Tom will **in** jure **noth** ing."_

No whips, either, not really, only the nightsticks and the hard heels of their hands, but that was bad enough, surely? (Those and the needles, always needles.) This was supposed to be a more enlightened century. Bedlam was supposed to be the bad old days.

There were rumors there was a secret ward, somewhere down in the belly of the beast, where they ran all kinds of horrific experiments on patients they'd recorded as released, or escaped, or just quietly disappeared once they were fairly sure there was no one who would notice, or care. J would have thought if it existed he'd be there already, but then, he _was_ fairly high-profile. And now there was Harlene to notice. Maybe the drugs and bruises and solitary confinement were just to soften him up for the real thing, the grinding wheels that were supposed to really chew him up and spit him out, unmade. Clown jelly. It tastes funny.

_"I know **more** than Apollo,_

_for oft, when **he** lies sleeping_

_I see the stars_

_at mortal wars_

_in the_

**_wounded_ **

**_welkin_ **

**_weeping."  
_**

It was the helplessness that made it awful, he guessed. The fact that there was no freedom here, except whatever you could persuade the authorities to permit you. So long as you behaved, nothing really bad happened, and for some people that was more than good enough, but the knowledge that it _could,_ and there would be no recourse, _nothing_ you could do to make it better...very little you could do to help any of the others...and _just_ enough truly decent people involved in all of it that you could no more blow the place up and cackle over the ruins than you could do the same to City Hall, or Wayne Tower, or any other place the malevolence of Authority concentrated itself.

This last half year it had taken self-discipline he'd never known he _had_ to keep from beating himself to death against the walls of his prison, like a bird in a glass box, and...maybe Owlman had simply been curious, what a mental hospital could do with someone like him, if slow steady pressure could grind down things no single hard blow had managed to shatter. The way the place was run _had_ to appeal to his fascist sensibilities.

His ideal Gotham had to be like this, all fear and trembling submission and everyone selling each other out for the sake of a leg up, and the knowledge that nothing you could do would ever count for anything, nothing but running away.

But _that wasn't the real Gotham._ Don't forget that, Mister J. Don't let them take that from you.

Jokester was the only patient housed on this corridor, because Arkham was far from filled to capacity and they liked to make sure solitary was _solitary_ , broken only just enough by the uncaring monitoring eyes to remind you of your solitude and lack of privacy. (There were, in fact, padded cells that were even more cut off, but no one was willing to trust the Jokester to the sole supervision of cameras.) And it was deep night, so the lights were off in his cell, and dimmed down to almost nothing even in the corridor itself.

It was gloriously spooky.

_"The **Moon's** my constant mistress,_

_the lonely **Owl** my marrow._

_The flaming **d** **rake  
**_

_And the                                                     night_

_crow_

_**make** \--_

_**BBBBBBBBBRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIINNGGGGGG!!!!!!!!** _

The shrill klaxon of the fire alarm split the air like a chainsaw, drowning everything in a burst of pure noise. One thing Arkham spared no expense on, these days, was the fire detection system--not after the near miss with that meta Fins had taken down.

" _Me music to my sorrow,"_   Jokester finished the verse with a snigger and a slightly pained grimace, though the notes didn't make it even to his own ears under the scream of the alarm. He stuck his fingers in them, for a few seconds, as he adjusted to the broken silence, and then perked up at the approaching beams of two flashlights.

Brad and his patrol partner, a slimmer, more uncertain man known as Tommy, met up conveniently just outside Jokester's door. "Did they warn _you_ there was a drill?" Tommy asked, in a half-shout over the alarms.

"Probably one of the lady shrinks used too much hair spray or something," Brad snorted in reply. Which meant _no._

"So...we take the inmate and head downstairs?" Tommy glanced uncomfortably at Jokester's door, against which he was plastered, watching the pair intently.

Jokester grinned through the bars, wide and red-white and just _delighted_ to get out of his cell. Brad shuddered, then tried to hide it a little late with a shake of his shoulders. "Leave him," he grumbled.

"Uh," said Tommy uncertainly.

"Look, it's not like it's a real fire, let's just go help with the evacuation, you know it's got to be a nightmare. If we let him out of his cell it's going to take both of us to watch him until they clear the place for reentry. Unless you want to be cuffed to him all night?" he added, sharply.

Now it was Tommy's turn to shiver. "Yeah, no, okay," he agreed, with a nod, and a nervous sidelong glance at the fixed red grin. "Yeah, you're right."

Jokester let out a disbelieving snicker, as the two guards turned away sharply. Banged on the grating with one hand, which didn't make them look back, although Tommy did hunch his shoulders slightly. "What, you're gonna leave me here to burn?" he shouted after them, when they were at just the right distance that Tommy would be too committed to departure to defy Brad and turn around, so that the pricking of his conscience would only make him hurry away more firmly around the corner and out of sight.

It was a risk, if he'd misread one of them, or sounded a little too hapless and not quite deranged enough, that they'd have listened to their better natures and turned around to retrieve him. But they didn't, and the clown in isolation cell IV threw his head back and, wrapping a stuttering descant high around the endless blaring klaxon, laughed with all the madness in his soul.

When the guards were safely out of hearing, J stopped laughing, fished out the key Doctor Q had slipped him after their session that morning, punched out the metal grill in the door, weakened with surreptitiously applied acid over the last several weeks, stretched his long skinny arm through the gap, and let himself into the empty corridor. " _Come dame, come maid, be not afraid..._ " he murmured, padding down the opposite way from the one Brad and Tommy had taken in his slipper-feet, deeper into the dimness lit by flashing red and white.

Arkham was a maze. It had been a manor, once; the Arkham family had been nouveau riche in the 1850s, and built themselves a splendid dwelling at the highest point of their private island. With a decent telescope, you could look across the bay at Gotham Heights and make out the stately homes of Bristol--Wayne Manor standing alone on the highest bluff, like the land's answer to Arkham on the sea. (The Wayne dwelling was actually older, having first been constructed on that spot in 1724, but little of the original structure remained today.)

The eldest son of Arkham manor's successful original builder had died as a child, and the second son in due course inherited, but he had always been a little off--haunted, the story went, by the ghost of his brother, though why this should be so in a time when child mortality had still been so very high even among the wealthy, no one could say--and it grew worse as he aged, until he slipped into near-seclusion, the eccentric hermit of Arkham Island, making constant new additions to his family's home, until after thirty years in his keeping it took on the look of a castle built by bees.

Eventually, in his old age, his children had managed to have him declared mentally incompetent, and shut him away deep at the heart of his precious building, where he lived another fifteen years in wretchedness and betrayed rage, with his insanity seeping into the stone. After his death, his youngest son turned the place into a madhouse, and so it had been ever since.

Arkham was no Winchester House; all the doors actually went _somewhere,_ and there were relatively few dead ends, but neither did the passageways and rooms, or the way in which one led into another, make much logical _sense_. It was a building that had accreted, rather than having been erected in keeping with a single architectural scheme; the center was sensible, but the rest sprawled as it would.

It was the other way around, with the city; the oldest parts were the ones that had grown up naturally, as people built one building and then another where they felt they ought to be, and put in roads and streets connecting them, and the streets slanted and curved at crazy angles. Further out you hit planned developments, and the gridded parts of the city proper which were partly later additions and partly imposed on the preexisting architecture. (J understood, now, as he had not years ago when he was new to living, why people might value something just for having existed a long time.)

He liked it. Everything else about Arkham was wrong, but the architecture felt right to him. He had no doubt of his route as he wended his way down through sloping corridors and rooms built inside of other rooms; everyone's mind was different, but even through the current noise and flashing lights, he thought he grasped the intuitive poetry that had guided Old Man Arkham as he built his home up around him.

It was a lonely kind of poem, and J found himself reaching out and patting the wall comfortingly as he approached the place where there should be a single electrical cable which, if disconnected, would cut power to the whole wing. "It's okay, old girl," he told the dark, ungainly hulk. "Poor Tom won't injure _much_ , I just need to slip away quietly, huh?"

The lights died, both the dim corner lamps and the flashing warnings, and the sirens fell silent. Best of all, the little red pilot light that said the nearest of the scattered security cameras was working was gone. He patted the wall again. "That's not so bad, right?" Power had first been added to the asylum in 1939, and in areas like this where patients (and donors) were not normally allowed, the wiring tended to run discretely along the corners of ceilings in little clips, painted to blend in. No one wanted to tear open and replace all their walls if they could help it. He thought this arrangement meant the building probably took its electricity less personally than most.

Since Arkham didn't seem to have any particular response, whether she agreed or not, Jokester fished out the tiny penlight he'd had hidden in his sock, and kept walking.

The original house had been built at the top of the tallest hill on the island, which meant that as Old Man Arkham had built out, he had eventually had to start building _down,_ for the sake of stability as the slope fell away toward the water, and as he was not completely crazy he had tried to replace some of the external doors he was covering up with new ones. It was one of these J was approaching, an obscure little portal tucked into the corner where two wings adjoined at ground level, out of the line of sight of the main entrance and all but a few risky windows. (Which at present should give only on empty rooms, because of the unscheduled fire alarm.) It had been fitted with a new, stronger modern bolt and lock a few years ago, and was kept locked at all times, since the warren of storage spaces and disused rooms that lay behind it weren't used by enough people to legally mandate that it be fitted as an accessible emergency exit.

Unfortunately. If it had had an emergency release bar, there would have been no need for a complex scheme to pilfer and replicate Amadeus Arkham's master key.

His doctor met him at the door. She was wearing all black, with her bright hair braided tightly and tucked under a black toque, so that the pale heart shape of her face seemed to hang in the darkness unsupported at first, until he and his light drew closer.

"Mister J," she said, smiling. She'd called him by just the initial, a few times, during their sessions, but he'd never told her to lose the title and she'd never presumed it lost.

He'd liked the implied respect, at first. He needed the reminder of distance, now.

Grinned at her. "Doc Q. I made it."

"I'm sure those orderlies were frightened out of their wits," she teased, and he dusted his hands off, modestly ducking his head because he knew it would make her laugh.

She didn't laugh, quite, but her teeth caught the moonlight as she turned the key in the lock and shoved the door wide with her shoulder, before taking half a step back and presenting him grandly with the outside world. A gift, from her to him.

J stepped up to the doorsill, peered out at the open sky he'd gone so long without seeing, filled his lungs with honest night air (fewer fumes than he was used to, this far from downtown, but he couldn't complain); beamed back up at the silver crescent riding high among wispy clouds.

Turned back to the earth, and the woman who'd trusted him enough to risk her career on the idea that the _right_ thing wasn't the same as the safe or the legal one. "Harley," he said. Just this once, because...because. He kind of really wanted to hug her, but. He just smiled, a _real_ smile, not the face he'd pulled at the orderlies or even like the ones he used when he was going up against Owlman. Even he could still look human, if he smiled soft enough. "Thanks. For everything."

"Think nothing of it," she said, smiling back, and handed him the bundle of actual-person clothes to change into - he was a hard man to disguise, but at least this way he'd be running across the open country between Arkham Island and the city proper in real shoes, and wouldn't scream 'escaped mental patient' at a glance.

"Thanks," he said again, folding them in against his chest, and Harley laughed, like muffled bells, but still a sweet, bright sound.

She leaned back on her heels and looked at him, her smile gone sort of crooked. "Well," she murmured, "ain't we a pair." Swallowed, looked sad for a moment even though the smile stayed, and didn't quite say goodbye. "Take care, Mister J."

J grinned over his shoulder, already picking his way down the narrow path, toward the little boat she'd left waiting at the water line. "You know me, Doctor Q."

Gravel crunched, and he stopped just before the path curved around a craggy boulder to wave, and she waved back. And then he was gone, and the door was closed, and locked as though it had never been opened at all, preserving the mystery of the Jokester's escape. And that was that. Was that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Except, of course, there's a chapter four. 
> 
> Almost none of the Arkham story here is taken from comics canon. Literally, close to zip. Because a) the official story as invented in '89 is just gratuitously hideous and b) it makes Arkham only a few decades old, and I have trouble finding anything that happened less than a hundred years ago respectably spooky. (Winchester House, btw, is a famously creepy maze-mansion built by the widow of the Winchester Rifle Co.'s founder, to protect her from the ghosts of everyone her family's guns had killed.)
> 
> Tom O'Bedlam was a generic sixteenth-century term for a mad beggar, and the song is a famous anonymous composition from that time. :D Line breaks mostly as received, but the boldtext and usage of right and center paragraph were added by me to convey the effect of the singing. Note also that J was singing the verses utterly out of order.
> 
> Yes there was another Mad Max reference _don't judge me._ -_-


	4. Harlequin

The knock on the door came around dawn. Just before, really, in the icy half-light. J pulled it open, and found his smile frozen on his lips.

"Hey," said Harlene Quinzel. She was wearing a red coat and a fluffy hat with earflaps, and her cheeks were bright with cold. If she had been less vibrantly alive, she might have resembled an exquisite doll.

"Harlene," he said. Then he stomped on his own foot, proving that yes, he _was_ awake, and should not say any of the things he was thinking.

"You need a new hideout," she told him, smiling. "If I could find you, so can Owlman. All he needs is the sense to send a harmless-looking minion asking until they find a friend of yours."

"Ah…" That was probably true. Plenty of people knew where his place was, and they weren't all especially paranoid. He _had_ to start thinking more like a fugitive. Everything had changed subtly in the seven months he'd spent inside, though, and he was still finding the lay of the land, and definitely hadn't thought to put out a request to please _not_ tell anyone where to find him, once he finally landed a place again.

Maybe he could go stay with Ed for a while; Alonzo'd offered to have him, but he had three kids and his niece these days and there wasn't really space. Especially for someone who might have a homicidal maniac in a bird suit come down like the hammer of some feathery god at any moment. Harvey Dent, maybe? He hadn't heard from him since before Arkham. Had he sold his house yet?

J huffed, half amusement and half frustration. "Thanks for the heads-up. Harlene, what are you _doing_ here?"

Harlene looked wry. "We screwed up. Footage turned up of me breaking you out."

Jokester gripped the edge of the door. He should've _known_ some of the cameras had internal power. Or maybe the Owl had put in his own, instead of piggybacking. "What happened?"

"Well, I'm pretty sure Bruce Wayne would have strangled me to death right then and there, if there hadn't been witnesses."

J laughed. "Yeah, it's a pretty mutual antipathy," he admitted. "But what about _you?_ "

Harlene shrugged, her droll nonchalance perfectly undisturbed. "I've had all my licenses to do pretty nearly everything suspended. They only hadn't fired me because they wanted to drag me through a whole conduct investigation first, so I quit."

J pressed a fist against his mouth to hold in his horror. He should never have asked her for help. Other people weren't supposed to suffer for him. All that time trying to find a way out that didn't risk any lives, and he'd wound up sacrificing _her,_ of all people. "I'm so sorry," he said through his knuckles.

She laughed, bright and brassy. "It's okay, J. I lost everything, but that just means there's nothing holding me back. I wanted to come with you all along. I just...wasn't brave enough."

Gales of particularly mad laughter were building in his throat, but this for once was not the time, and Jokester throttled them down. She didn't mean it like that. And he couldn't let this happen. "Tell them I forced you," he urged her. "Tell them I tricked you. I'll play up any role you want, just get them to let you go home."

She shook her head. "I don't want to. J, I've devoted my whole life to sanity—"

"Exactly!" he interjected.

"And it sucked! I was turning into such a selfish bitch. Arkham's a hellhole, and I don't want to be part of any of it anymore." She moved forward, a little, so she was less on the doorstep and more on the threshold, laid her hand against the doorframe. "I want to be crazy with you."

Now Jokester laughed, because he had to. Knowing it might drive her away to be laughed at, and knowing she'd never gotten angry about it before. Had he really made it sound so good, his life? He loved it, sure, would love it more with her around even if she never saw him as more than a hilarious friend with a cut-up face, but _he_ was supposed to be the one who made crazy decisions on the spur of the moment. Harlene was too clever to let herself in for this kind of life.

"You've never even seen me out of the clinical setting," he argued. "Half the time you've known me I've been on drugs."

"Only half?" she teased.

He rolled his eyes. "I really hate those pills." He slumped against the edge of the half-open door. He'd laughed in her face and she was still standing on his doorstep in the frost, cheerfully unemployed because of him, and of course he wasn't going to turn her away but there had to be something they could do, some way to _fix_ this. (He was aware his need to fix things bordered on the pathological, but that didn't make it a part of himself he was willing to give up.) "Harlene…"

"I let my friends call me Harley," she reminded him. He raised his face to smile at her, and her hand left the door to…rest against his cheek. J stopped breathing.

"And I'm kinda hoping," she added, even more quietly, as her thumb ran just above the roughness of scar there, "that I can get the world to call me Harlequin."

Apart from that one session where she'd held his hand, they'd never touched in Arkham. Professional distance, after all, and he was known to be dangerous, and _he_ certainly hadn't been going to risk reaching out and frightening her, or giving himself away. Now she was leaning across his doorsill, cupping his face in her warm tiny hand, and for this moment nothing was funny and he didn't even mind. He could get lost in just having her here, touching his scars like there was nothing wrong with them. "Harlequin," he whispered.

For the second time he could ever remember, he was terrified. This was a terrible idea. But hey, he was crazy, right? He smothered an inappropriate giggle.

He bent. Slowly enough she would have more than enough time to draw away again if he'd misunderstood, but she didn't, and he kissed her. Badly, he was sure—he'd only kissed a few girls that he could remember, and that had all been before Owlman had carved up his face, and his lips didn't really work the same way anymore—but Harlene didn't seem to care. She kissed him _back_.

It was over quickly, really, not so much out of failure of nerve as because he'd already been low on oxygen when they started, and he leaned lightheaded against the doorframe as she grinned up at him. Definitely smug. Maybe she was already as crazy as he was.

"There you go, Mister J," she told him. Stood up on her toes and dropped another quick, sweet kiss at the corner of his mouth, like she was trying to get him to _actually_ faint.

Then she had her arms around his neck, had hoisted herself off the ground and pivoted her weight around him so that suddenly she was inside, and then with a wicked grin pushed them both off the doorframe with her feet so that he had to stumble back a few steps or fall over, and kicked the door shut behind them, before dropping to the floor. "And there _I_ go," she announced, sounding perfectly satisfied.

He'd spent a lot of time in her office, plush and book-lined, with excessively comfortable chairs, and while he did have some books and plenty of color, the best thing you could really say about his room was 'not dirty.' Even if he'd had a lot of funds at his disposal, he moved too frequently to get really settled and homey anywhere, and he felt self-conscious about everything from the hotplate to the unmade bed and the draft under the door. Harlene twinkled around at all of it, and pulled off her fluffy hat as if to emphasize that she intended to stay. The same smile pulled at the corner of her mouth that she got when she was winning at checkers.

J bit the inside of his cheek. This was bad. He _knew_ this was bad, and he was being selfish, and he shouldn't. Harlene deserved so much better. But it _wasn't his decision to make._

"You sure about this…Harley?" he asked her curtain of yellow hair, as she strolled away to the corner where he piled all the odds and ends that made costumes. He'd never seen it loose before.

Harlene turned back around with a black half-mask pressed to her face, and suddenly he grasped the sense of unbridled _freedom_ she packed into every motion now, as she never had before, in the glint of tiny white teeth and the jaunty thrust of her elbow. "I am _so_ sure."

Freedom was the most important thing in the world.

"Well…" he said slowly. "I guess, in the pantomime, Harlequin always wins in the end…"

Harlene threw her head back and laughed that laugh he loved, delicate notes building and resounding until they could have been a cathedral at matins. Swift certain fingers knotted the mask-strings and seized a cheap felt jester's hat, which jingled as she crammed it on and crossed the brief distance back to him. She tossed her head in a flurry of bright little bells and golden silk, and hooked a hand around his neck once again. "Kiss me, my Fool."

That was the real line from the film, J realized, not the version you usually heard, and he reached up to brush his fingers through her hair, not even trying not to smile. "You know that was the villain's line, doncha Harl?"

She did. That catch to her mouth. "Would it matter, if I was the bad guy?"

"Yes." It would matter so much it would probably kill him. "But you're not."

"I'm not," she agreed. Before Harlequin was a hero or a trickster, he was a devil. That was why the mask was black. Through Harley's mask her blue eyes were fixed on him, and J knew he'd give almost anything to keep them that warm. "One more hero," she said. "You're not getting rid of me, Mister J."

February couldn't put a dent in the rising sun. "Wouldn't dream of it."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Film quoted is the classic A Fool There Was (1915), featuring a wicked seductress and the married man she ruins. More often quoted as 'Kiss me, you fool!'
> 
> Jokester was referring to the Harlequinade pantomime genre when he said Harlequin always wins, but the trickster has a pretty good romantic record from his days as a bumbling sidekick, too. (Traditionally, when you see Harlequin and Clown as a duo, Clown is the idiot role. I don't think J minds; I assume the Joker doesn't know.) 
> 
> For those wishing further useless information, the early-modern Italian zanni character Arlecchino, who became Harlequin in England, was named after/based on the French medieval passion play comic devil Hellequin, who was taken in turn from the folkloric monster of the same name, a French cognate of the German Erlkönig and English Herla-cyning - that is, head of a version of the Wild Hunt, first attested 11th ce. The history of Harlequin is practically the history of European culture, I swear. At least the last thousand years of it.
> 
> {All the references can't stop won't stop.}


End file.
